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A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

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Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#161

Post by apathymannequin »

coryrc wrote: post #115
ahoy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the classic "only monocultures can work toward the social good, if we'd stop accepting 'outsiders' we could do the same" trope. It's tired and xenophobic. The presence of foreigners isn't why laws that benefit already-wealthy real estate developers persist.

It's much nicer to live densely when your 100s of neighbors within earshot don't play music loudly, let their dogs bark, sit on the street playing drums at midnight, etc. like in the USA.

I just got back from Japan and it is always surprising whenever I first get into town how quiet everything/everyone is both in their homes and walking around.

A major factor there is the lack of cars (and higher buildings to wall out car noise from highways) compared to where I live, but even so people are just quiet. It was weird for a while, but coming back to the states I really miss it.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#162

Post by mikevp »

Interesting...

At first, I thought nominating Carson for head of HUD was a very strange choice. He's a neurosurgeon. Why???

But then... He was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, so he had some administrative experience.

Then, I realized that Ben Carson has one bit of very relevant life experience that no other HUD director has ever had: He grew up in The Projects.

I thought then that that might lead to something interesting. Seems I may have been right.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#163

Post by dragonwriter »

joshe wrote: post #34
imgabe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is the case for a lot of the differences between the US and other countries. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as "just make the Federal government do it for everyone". The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US and delegates everything else to state and local governments.

What people are thinking is to do it at the state level (California, Oregon). There are no restrictions on what states can do relative to cities. (In other words, if a city can do it a state can too, cities are entirely creatures of the state, there is no real 'federalism' below the state level.) This HUD effort would be more minor, something like removing some zoning restrictions in order to get federal dollars. The…

> There are no restrictions on what states can do relative to cities.

Just because the restrictions on this are not in the federal Constitution doesn't mean they don't exist; just as the federal Constitution has rules on State-Federal power balance, State constitutions often have rules on State-local power balance.

State Constitutions are usually procedurally easier to amend than the federal one, though, so, the barriers, though real, are smaller.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#164

Post by tptacek »

platinumrad wrote: post #157
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the question. Japan is intensely racist and xenophobic, probably significantly more so than the US.

Their point was that Japan is ethnically and culturally homogeneous enough that they don't feel the need to implement exclusionary zoning, regardless of how racist and xenophobic the general population is.

My understanding is that this is not in fact true: there are significant populations of disfavored minorities in urban Japan.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#165

Post by dragonwriter »

skh wrote: post #28
pitaj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The constitution limits the authority of what the Federal government can do in the US I wish. If that was true I'd be much happier with politics than I am.

Your response only makes sense if the there are no constitutionally enforced limits on the powers of the federal government vs. state governments. The Medicare portion of the ACA being struck down by the Supreme Court is a notable counterexample to your comment. The check on federal powers may not go as far as you like but laughing in response to the comment that was made is in poor taste.

> The Medicare portion of the ACA being struck down by the Supreme Court is a notable counterexample to your comment.

Except that, AFAICT, didn't happen. (Though there is a current challenge to the Constitutionality of the Medicare changes, among other things.)

You may be thinking of the mandatory (for continued state participation in Medicaid) expansion of Medicaid portion of the ACA being made optional rather than mandatory by the Supreme Court.

Of course, one could argue that is an example that is arbitrary and, while it certainly evidences judicial limits, is hard to connect to it's Constitutional pretext, as it explicitly requires that both pre-expansion Medicaid are post-expansion Medicaid are Constitutional federal programs, but that Congress is somehow barred from replacing one with the others except by consent of the individual participating state.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#166

Post by joecot »

bluGill wrote: post #147
joecot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would they though? Are cities required to make up the difference? Problem: cities are artificially keeping housing prices up, pushing lower income people out in favor of the upper class. The housing market is forcing lower income people out of cities. Solution: tell cities they have to stop artificially keeping housing prices up, or the federal government will stop subsidizing low income housing and subsidized loans.…

It isn't just about your city. If the working poor find it advantageous to live your city for one half way across the state that is less people to work the lower income jobs - now it is more expensive to get the toilets cleaned in the office. This raises your cost of living, and lowers it in the other city. Of course how this all works out is very complex and messy and will take dozens of years before we see anything…

San Francisco has already found "ways" to deal with many of those issues. They can't afford wait staff anymore, so restaurants are switching to counter service[1]. A law firm started housing their lawyers in Texas and flying them in because it was cheaper than housing there [2]. Delivery drivers can't afford to work there, so they experimented with having robots do it instead [3].

It's been tremendously clear that San Francisco has become an experiment in seeing if you can still run a city while pushing out all the poor people. Its been worker infrastructure has been coming apart at the seams for years now and the city's leadership has made little attempt towards fixing it -- instead entrepreneurs are just trying to find ways to work around it. I have little confidence that threatening to pull federal housing funding will dissuade the city from their path.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17394551

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15874565

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880100

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#167

Post by dionidium »

zepto wrote: post #158
dionidium wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Federal zoning would be really difficult to get done constitutionally Would it? I feel like this has Commerce Clause uber alles written all over it.

How is zoning about interstate commerce?

"How is about interstate commerce?" is a question that's been asked by reasonable people for many values of x that've been before the Supreme Court.

In other words, don't ask me. Ask SCOTUS. They've used the Commerce Clause to justify regulations on activities that were far less obviously about interstate commerce than zoning is, most famously in Wickard_v._Filburn, which restricts a farmers right to grow wheat on his own property for his own consumption, which, according to the court, is indeed an example of interstate commerce.

My statement, in other words, has nothing to do with my own interpretation of those rulings. It's merely an acknowledgement of them. It's not difficult to think of ways in which local zoning restrictions affect national commerce. And that's been good enough for the Court in the past, it seems.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#168

Post by captain_perl »

educationdata wrote: post #83
xvedejas wrote: post #3

In Japan, zoning is handled federally; and the result is much more affordable cities. "Why Tokyo is the land of rising home construction but not prices" https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3... An overview of zoning practices there: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Is there any data to support that Tokyo has more affordable apartment than New York? I have seen numbers compare rental price of 1/2/3 bedroom(s) in Tokyo to New York [1,2], but I do not trust those numbers, because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC. I don't have a statistics for this, but there is an example [3].…

> because they do not have the size of the apartment. I think it really matters, because apartments in Tokyo could be much smaller than those in NYC.

No, it doesn't matter to most people. A country with smaller apartments will have smaller appliances, smaller computers, etc. - like Japan.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#169

Post by village-idiot »

munificent wrote: post #78
FussyZeus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we can make more computers, execute more healthcare services, etc. Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Add to it, land is the primary method by which "old money" remains in that category.

> Land is a zero sum game; we have a fixed amount, and while it's possible to create more, it's prohibitively expensive to do so. Yes, but that sum in the US is huge . Drive around the midwest or any region outside of an urban core and its empty space as far as the eye can see. The problem is large-scale economic and demographic changes. The US used to have: * A culture that prized living in suburbia away from dense…

Suburbia is a short term and unsustainable model. The long term costs of purposefully watering down your economic activity per infrastructure dollar is horrible.

Re: A proposal to roll back exclusionary zoning would make housing more affordable

#170

Post by [deleted] »

kcorbitt wrote: post #146
maxsilver wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big difference between the two. I'm totally ok with Japanese zoning, if we get Japanese depreciation and all housing is required to become worthless after 2 decades. However, YIMBYs only want half of that -- they want Japanese zoning, with American infinite appreciation. Which is disastrous to basically everyone who works for a living.

> YIMBYs want [...] American infinite appreciation. I'd appreciate a source on this. Most self-identified YIMBYs I've met in San Francisco would be ecstatic if housing prices stabilized or fell – in fact that's one of their primary objectives. Vocal YIMBYs I've met are either (1) young people who don't own property, for whom the current stratospheric prices are out of reach, or (2) employers who have to convince thos…

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